poetry

Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah still remembers hearing the first poem that moved him.

When Porsha Olayiwola was named Boston’s third poet laureate, she had just started her MFA program at Emerson. Still discovering who she was as a poet, she experienced some imposter syndrome at first, she admitted, but ultimately accepted the title and its associated responsibilities as a “gift.”

On a recent Monday afternoon, Andrea Herbert Major was in full director mode at the Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts. Wearing an all-black ensemble with pink pointe shoes to match her Barbie-pink nails, she sat in a wood-floored studio fine-tuning a series of dance routines.

The operatic art form gets a diverse and educational spin in “Celebrating Black Excellence: Opera, Art Song, and the Harlem Renaissance,” a program produced by Opera on Tap.

In “Phillis in Boston,” a world premiere play debuting at the Old South Meeting House next month, African American poet and prodigy Phillis Wheatley is in the spotlight.

Nikki Giovanni, one of the great poets of the Black Arts movement in the late 1960s, and Javon Jackson, saxophonist and composer, have paired up to release “The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni” on Feb. 18.

In just five years in Paris, Malik Ameer Crumpler has made a space and a name for himself in avant-garde arts and culture circles.

Headlined by keynote speaker and 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown, the Roxbury Poetry Festival will feature writers, panelists and curators in conversation. Poets of all ages and styles will come together at the festival on June 5 to celebrate the powerful medium.

Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola writes and performs poems rooted in Afro-futurism, magical realism, and science fiction.

Poetry helps us find our way to ourselves and to others, and poems can be a source of consolation, courage and connection in a challenging time. An ideal way to begin is to sign up for free daily delivery of a poem via e-mail at poets.org/poem-a-day.

Saxophonist Ricky Ford, poet Askia Touré, and pianist and arranger John Kordalewski are bring-ing original jazz and the poetry of Langston Hughes to the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building for one night only on Saturday, March 14, from 7 to 9 p.m.

On Tuesday, Feb. 5, the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery came alive with the sights and sounds of black talent. “#HellaBlack: BCA Mixtape Vol. 1” was a one-night pop-up celebration of Boston’s wide-ranging artists of color.